About every booth counts

A wheelchair / step-free access archive and scorecard for federal polling places, built from the AEC’s own published data. This is a wheelchair access artifact — not a general “accessibility” product, and not a claim about any other kind of disability access.

Benchmark: JSCEM’s own standard, not RioLabs’ judgment

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) recommended in its June 2026 interim report (Recommendation 13) that “the majority of polling places in each electorate are physically accessible.” This site uses that recommendation as a published baseline for comparison — it is JSCEM’s benchmark, not a RioLabs accessibility judgment, and it is not a compliance target: nothing exists to comply with until the government responds. Government response to Recommendation 13: pending as of 2026-07-17.

Publication status

Public data preview — approved 21 July 2026. Publication is limited to this dated scorecard and non-map address/locality experience. No public trend display, custom domain, campaign, or outreach is part of this approval.

Method

Why there is no 2022-to-current trend shown

Status: display held; method break-marked.

The methodology audit is break-marked: only the 2022 and 2025 federal election-day gazettals may form a future fixed-rule pair. The 2023 referendum and moving current roster are context only, and the AEC's published 7,208-place 2025 universe must not be substituted for this archive's 6,966-row election-day gazettal universe. No public trend display was requested for the September release, so this build publishes no delta, trend line, or cross-year change claim.

Audit doc: docs/trend-audit.md. Both years’ literal figures are computed and retained in the underlying dataset for future audit use; this site simply never presents them side-by-side as a change or trend while the gate is closed.

Framing commitments

Rights and attribution

Source data: Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) per-polling-place wheelchair-access CSVs. © Commonwealth of Australia, licensed under CC BY 4.0. This project is not affiliated with the AEC. Not an official AEC product, and not endorsed by the AEC. During elections the AEC's own tool is the canonical source — this is historical/archival. — during any federal election period, use the AEC’s own official website (aec.gov.au) for current polling-place information.

Provenance

Every figure on this site traces to one of these two AEC source files. Roster rule: Status in {Current, Appointment}.